Whenever I watch Goodbye, Dragon Inn, I react in two very different ways, depending on my mood at the time.

 

The First:

I can't tell if this is a test of my tolerance of indie cinematic nonsense, or a joke that everyone is playing on me. Am I the only one that notices that nothing is happening? Nobody is doing anything. Half the running time is spent on watching people while they themselves watch a movie - still and emotionless. The actors rarely move, and if so, it is in a rhythmic and repetitive motion. There are maybe two lines of dialogue, and the camera is perpetually static and almost always at a wide angle. Is Ming-liang Tsai serious, or has he purposely wasted 90 minutes of thousands of people's time? Perhaps like a painter who paints a dot in the middle of his canvas and displays it proudly for people to try and interpret, Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a social experiment on how far people are willing to go to explain the hidden depths of nothing at all.

Hell, I could film the sequel to this movie tonight. I'll just dress up in a nice suit and film myself tying and untying my shoes for a couple of hours. Viola! A fucking work of art. If you don't get it, you're obviously an idiot.

 

The Second:

What an enchanting film. The pictures of Jim Jarmusch often employ a similar slow-burn, still-camera method, but never quite to this extent. Goodbye, Dragon Inn forces the viewer to react differently to cinema than they normally would. Rather than being swept along (or dragged along) by a standard narrative, it challenges the viewer to examine and study every frame, milking the cinematography for all its worth. There are subtle touches to the set design that one would otherwise never notice. As a movie-going audience, I think we are prone to being lazy. We “speed-read” certain films, because in general Hollywood encourages us to. Tsai has made a picture that, if one has the patience and takes the time, can allow for a great appreciation for not only it, but many other films as well.

Aside from its technique, I also like the (I would say plot, but…) circumstances of the film. It's a sort of an absurd valentine to the movie-going experience, and predicts the ending of an era.* Its characters are hopeless romantics (the woman with the limp is in love with the projectionist, the other protagonist is in love with film and savors the experience of the big screen, and the actors of Dragon Inn reminisce about the old days and their adventures in creating the great picture). Even just the fact that they chose Dragon Inn as the film to center around is a lovely and apt decision.

Most of all though, I like how Goodbye, Dragon Inn sits in my memory. Thinking about it is like a warm cup of hugs. While there may be times when I sit down to watch it and find I have zero tolerance, I will always remember it fondly after the fact .

 

Which of these categories you will fit into will differ from person to person, from viewing to viewing.

 

*The end of an era I'm referring to is obviously the movie theater experience, and with the quality of home theater systems and the availability of movies over the internet, this isn't the first anyone has heard of this potential demise. I hold a different perspective however, as I think that 3-D cinema is going to keep those people who may be on the fence coming back to the big screen. Once it becomes commonplace and loses its “gimmickiness” audiences will realize the power that it can wield in involving them in the experience of the picture. The future of film is in 3 dimensions.